I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday dinosaur this Thanksgiving, and thank you joining me in this delightful excursion out into the wide wonderful world of ideas and expressions in evolution.

Chronicle Canyon

History in the layers and controversies in the stories they tell.

How did we eradicate Malaria in the United States? A thought-provoking guest post from Daniel Parker titled Social Malaria, which puts forth a compelling argument that we can get a better return on our anti-malarial investment by focusing on socioeconomic factors rather than dusting Africa in DDT (Via Anne Buchanan of The Mermaid’s Tale).

Romeo Vitelli of Providentia brings us a bizarre human interest story in The Evolution of Charlotte Bach, who I can only describe as a “quack” of an evolutionary theorist who wrote numerous books, gave public talks, and hid a very dark side of her life that was only uncovered after her death.

MicroCosmos Pond

The smooth surface hides a tiny world packed with ideas.

S.E. Gould, of the Lab Rat blog, has posted How the animals lost their sensors, refering to the “Two Component System” (TCS) of molecular signal and response found in archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, plants, fungi, and several protazoa–but not animals. (Via Bjørn Østman’s of Pleiotropy)

Bjørn Østman’s post Pleiotropy saves the day for evolving new genes explores the origin of new genes via Näsvall et al’s innovation-amplification-divergene model (IAD), where a gene “becomes pleiotropic, is copied, followed by divergence, and then loss of pleiotropy.”

Joachim of Mousetrap presents On testing the Red Queen hypothesis Part I and Part 2 exploring the general Red Queen hypothesis that “hosts, parasites, predators, or competitors” are pushing species into an arms race of constant adaptation, and the problem of Hamiltonian parasites, parasites that have shorter lifespans and evolve faster than their hosts–like bacteria on an elephant, which we would expect to out-pace their hosts and kill them.

Genome Engineering’sSuzanne Elvidge’s brings us three posts this month covering recent research in genetics and evolution. Her summaries are provided.

While the links between the study of rocks and fossils and the high-tech field of genetics are not necessarily obvious at first glance, a recent review in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology shows that the connection is perhaps closer than you would think. While paleontology looks at what happened in evolution, developmental genetics can help researchers to unpack how it happened, and so each discipline can feed into and support the other.

An international team of researchers, including researchers from China, Germany, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, has discovered a new piece of genetic information that could give a clue to how the human brain evolved, and what makes humans and apes different from each other.

Researchers from the 1000 Genome Project have sequenced the genomes of 1092 people from 14 ethnic groups, from Africa to Asia and from Europe to the Americas, using a combination of low-coverage whole-genome and exome sequencing. This has created what the team has described as the largest and most detailed catalogue of human genetic variation.

Bradly Alicea of Synthetic Daisies has a post close to my heart, but rather deep to follow (I hope I don’t mangle it), Artificial Life meets Geodynamics (EvoGeo), which covers a computer model based on a computational tool for fluid mechanics adapted for automata diffusion, adding a dynamic topology to simulate environmental changes such as those produced by plate tectonics, and finally applying a fitness function to the automata to restrict the flow of genes through the environment. It’s a fascinating project at the crossroads of evolutionary studies and computer science.

Stephen McCanny of Ecoknowledge has an intriguing post titled Limits of natural selection, where he explores what he perceives as “three limits to natural selection” in contributing to the origin of species, prevention of species extinction, and predicting the results of selection.

Ryan Somma has spent 15 years as a professional software developer currently working in Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS). This blog is a variety show of his various nerdy interests, from information science, to Enlightenment philosophy, to science fiction.